Graceful yet Distasteful Website Queuing

An emerging trend amongst online retailers such as event ticketing, travel, electronic, clothing, and news and media companies is to use traffic management and queuing technology to provide optimised web site performance at peak and super-peak times. These queuing systems prevent the website from becoming unstable due to unexpectedly high user concurrency and loading. The down-side is that the user may have to wait for a significantly extended period of time. On Black Friday 2014 it was common for websites to be inaccessible for hours. On several sites where delays were observed, queuing systems were operating.

The case for investment in queuing systems is made on the premise that users are tolerant and therefore prepared to wait longer at busy times in order to secure a purchase or gain access information. Vendors of the queuing solutions claim that users are far less tolerant of unstable websites where no such protection exists. Whilst this is a reasonable argument, the evidence from vendors own research tends to suggest that even with queuing systems in place, a significant percentage of users are still deterred from proceeding further, in many cases never to return.

A more balanced approach for ensuring satisfactory website experience at peak times is required to ensure commercial and other objectives are achieved. Given that rapid page response is a fundamentally important aspect it would seem wise to optimise page and application performance to achieve response requirements. The greater body of evidence suggest that the vast majority of slow page response issues originate from poor web and application design and build practices this therefore needs be a focus of performance optimisation. Queuing systems will undoubtedly be important as a last resort. The danger is that queuing software and policies are seen as the complete solution to protect websites.

With Black Friday approaching it is highly likely that many online retailers have implemented defensive queuing systems. It seems likely that customers who adopt this approach without robustly assuring the performance of the website will not be able to reach their business targets during this busy sales period.